J. BERG ESENWEIN DALE CARNAGEY - THE ART OF PUBLIC SPEAKING

probation for a crown, and am acknowledged to be innocent of all

offence; while you are already judged to be a pettifogger, and

the question is, whether you shall continue that trade, or at

once be silenced by not getting a fifth part of the votes. A

happy fortune, do you see, you have enjoyed, that you should

denounce mine as miserable!

--DEMOSTHENES.

7. After careful study and practice, mark the pauses in the following:

The past rises before me like a dream. Again we are in the

great struggle for national life. We hear the sounds of

preparation--the music of the boisterous drums, the silver

voices of heroic bugles. We see thousands of assemblages, and

hear the appeals of orators; we see the pale cheeks of women and

the flushed faces of men; and in those assemblages we see all

the dead whose dust we have covered with flowers. We lose sight

of them no more. We are with them when they enlist in the great

army of freedom. We see them part from those they love. Some are

walking for the last time in quiet woody places with the maiden

they adore. We hear the whisperings and the sweet vows of

eternal love as they lingeringly part forever. Others are

bending over cradles, kissing babies that are asleep. Some are

receiving the blessings of old men. Some are parting from those

who hold them and press them to their hearts again and again,

and say nothing; and some are talking with wives, and

endeavoring with brave words spoken in the old tones to drive

from their hearts the awful fear. We see them part. We see the

wife standing in the door, with the babe in her arms--standing

in the sunlight sobbing; at the turn of the road a hand

waves--she answers by holding high in her loving hands the

child. He is gone--and forever.

--ROBERT J. INGERSOLL, _to the Soldiers of Indianapolis_.

8. Where would you pause in the following selections? Try pausing in

different places and note the effect it gives.

The moving finger writes; and having writ moves on: nor all your

piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all

your tears wash out a word of it.

The history of womankind is a story of abuse. For ages men beat,

sold, and abused their wives and daughters like cattle. The

Spartan mother that gave birth to one of her own sex disgraced

herself; the girl babies were often deserted in the mountains to

starve; China bound and deformed their feet; Turkey veiled their

faces; America denied them equal educational advantages with

men. Most of the world still refuses them the right to

participate in the government and everywhere women bear the

brunt of an unequal standard of morality.

But the women are on the march. They are walking upward to the

sunlit plains where the thinking people rule. China has ceased

binding their feet. In the shadow of the Harem Turkey has opened

a school for girls. America has given the women equal

educational advantages, and America, we believe, will

enfranchise them.

We can do little to help and not much to hinder this great

movement. The thinking people have put their O.K. upon it. It is

moving forward to its goal just as surely as this old earth is

swinging from the grip of winter toward the spring's blossoms

and the summer's harvest.[1]

9. Read aloud the following address, paying careful attention to pause

wherever the emphasis may thereby be heightened.

_THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT_

... At last, the Republican party has appeared. It avows, now,

as the Republican party of 1800 did, in one word, its faith and

its works, "Equal and exact justice to all men." Even when it

first entered the field, only half organized, it struck a blow

which only just failed to secure complete and triumphant

victory. In this, its second campaign, it has already won

advantages which render that triumph now both easy and certain.

The secret of its assured success lies in that very

characteristic which, in the mouth of scoffers, constitutes its

great and lasting imbecility and reproach. It lies in the fact

that it is a party of one idea; but that is a noble one--an idea

that fills and expands all generous souls; the idea of equality

of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they all

are equal before the Divine tribunal and Divine laws.

I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun. I know, and

all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward. Twenty

senators and a hundred representatives proclaim boldly in

Congress to-day sentiments and opinions and principles of

freedom which hardly so many men, even in this free State, dared

to utter in their own homes twenty years ago. While the

government of the United States, under the conduct of the

Democratic party, has been all that time surrendering one plain

and castle after another to slavery, the people of the United

States have been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering

together the forces with which to recover back again all the

fields and all the castles which have been lost, and to confound

and overthrow, by one decisive blow, the betrayers of the

Constitution and freedom forever.

--W.H. SEWARD.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: From an editorial by D.C. in _Leslie's Weekly_, June 4,

1914. Used by permission.]

How soft the music of those village bells,

Falling at intervals upon the ear

In cadence sweet; now dying all away,

Now pealing loud again, and louder still,

Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on!

With easy force it opens all the cells

Where Memory slept.

Herbert Spencer remarked that "Cadence"--by which he meant the

modulation of the tones of the voice in speaking--"is the running

commentary of the emotions upon the propositions of the intellect." How

true this is will appear when we reflect that the little upward and

downward shadings of the voice tell more truly what we mean than our

words. The expressiveness of language is literally multiplied by this

subtle power to shade the vocal tones, and this voice-shading we call

_inflection_.

The change of pitch _within_ a word is even more important, because more

delicate, than the change of pitch from phrase to phrase. Indeed, one

cannot be practised without the other. The bare words are only so many

bricks--inflection will make of them a pavement, a garage, or a

cathedral. It is the power of inflection to change the meaning of words

that gave birth to the old saying: "It is not so much what you say, as

how you say it."

Mrs. Jameson, the Shakespearean commentator, has given us a penetrating

example of the effect of inflection; "In her impersonation of the part

of Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Siddons adopted successively three different

intonations in giving the words 'We fail.' At first a quick contemptuous

interrogation--'We fail?' Afterwards, with the note of admiration--'We

fail,' an accent of indignant astonishment laying the principal emphasis

on the word 'we'--'_we_ fail.' Lastly, she fixed on what I am convinced

is the true reading--_We fail_--with the simple period, modulating the

voice to a deep, low, resolute tone which settles the issue at once as

though she had said: 'If we fail, why then we fail, and all is over.'"

This most expressive element of our speech is the last to be mastered in

attaining to naturalness in speaking a foreign language, and its correct